Garbage day

We always did this growing up- to prevent half-empty (or half-full...depending on how you see things) garbage bags from being thrown out, we always amalgamated our garbage so that all the bags of garbage that we threw out where stretched to the max. All you have to do is just empty out the garbage into the half-full bag and tie it! It saves you from replacing all garbage cans with bags every week...

...and don't get me started on purchasing garbage bags!!! It's a complete waste of money. We just re-use grocery bags...and if it doesn't fit your garbage can, then get a smaller one!

On a side note, it's an interesting thing to notice how much garbage you produce each week. We make it a fun competition to make sure we have less than our neighbors. As a family with two young kids (in a diaper stage), we only produce one rubbermaid can of garbage every two weeks and one blue bag of recyclables every month.

How you ask? We don't buy a lot of pre-packaged, pre-made foods, we recycle whatever we can (haha no pun intended), we compost, we toilet train our kids early so they use significantly less diapers (around 4-5 times less than the average age-matched kid), we reuse our envelopes (makes for great note-jotters) and flyers/magazines/junk papers (makes for great drawing material and educational material for our toddler.)

I heard on the weekend that a diaper takes 500 years to degrade. That made my stomach turn.